


House of Cards

by NectarineMigraine



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Vignette, general bummer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21562435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NectarineMigraine/pseuds/NectarineMigraine
Summary: It's not a secret that they'd kissed once.  Maybe 'kissed' is the wrong word...
Relationships: Rhett McLaughlin/Link Neal
Kudos: 35





	House of Cards

None of this is a secret. 

It’s just been left desperately unspoken. It’s not something they discuss: how fragile all this is. Even if they’ve never spoken about it, they’ve never been able to keep anything from each other. Even when they tried. They’d always been able to see that secret swimming around in the darkness behind each other’s eyes. Even, he suspects, the packed-away, undeclared suffering of his heart. 

It’s not a secret that they’d kissed once. Maybe kissed is the wrong word. The afternoon before Rhett left for Slovakia for the summer, they’d spent time by the river together. Saying goodbye, there had been a tense embrace, fraught with the mounting separation anxiety they’d spent all afternoon ignoring, and it had lasted far too long. This after an increasingly restless year in the apartment he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He doesn’t remember quite how it happened, though there’s nothing he’d wish more to recall with more clarity. It had happened so suddenly, he’d failed to record every movement and thought—but Rhett’s mouth had found his, standing sweating in the blue, damp evening under one of the massive sweetgums that lined the riverbank. The most gentle, uncertain press of lips is what he does remember, and the way his muscles had snapped taut in knee jerk defense against god knows what. He’d gathered up tight-fisted, clammy handfuls of both shoulders of Rhett’s T-shirt, and a storm had blown through him—that withering nausea of sudden confrontation. 

When Rhett had gone to pull back, eyes averted, face scarlet—he’d held fast to that shirt when his tongue couldn’t make words. Held fast until Rhett had leaned back in, despite his white knuckled terror and shivering bones. Link remembers the rough alligator texture of the sweetgum bark biting into his back with Rhett pushed flush against his front, both of them clutching and breathing hard, vibrating with nerves, pressing their trembling, dumbstruck mouths together over and over until it was too dark to see. Two amazed boys, breathless in the humid summer dark, discovering the answer to a question they’d never been brave enough to give voice. 

He’d spent three months torturing himself over it afterward, proposed to Christy before Rhett had returned from overseas, erected a fortress wall of the expected status quo out of panic and fear, and there that wall had remained for twenty years. They’d never spoken of it again. 

But it’s not a _secret_. 

What might be a secret is how often he thinks of it. Sometimes it’s just with a throb of something in his gut, sometimes with a pain in his chest, like a needle pushing through his lungs, pinning him like an insect specimen to a cork board. Which feels appropriate. It’s a feeling he’s never been able to escape. 

Sometimes it’s more of an ache. A full body hunger that twists him in half. And of course, there’s always the shame. Not even because of the feelings themselves anymore, though it had been that kind of shame early on. No. The lingering shame is a self commentary on the pathetic trope of having been lovesick for his entire adult life with nothing to show for it but a feeling like a hot coal burning between his lungs, and the occasional humiliating jerk-off in a hotel shower when no one can catch him; when he feels removed enough from the sturdy bedrock of his life to hold the guilt at bay. Like a burning candle pushing back the dark, safety within the confines of its halo of light until it burns down to nothing.

Like one of those Catholic saints, revered for living a life in silent agony. Our lady of perpetual heartbreak. St. Charles the Denied.

To Link, love has always had something buried in it. Like a rock sunk in a snowball. Shame, pain, denial, guilt. Whether it’s Christy or it’s Rhett, it’s never been something he can feel freely without an attached self-flagellation for the existence of the other. And first love is a killer. Imagine holding onto it, white knuckled, for thirty years, suffocating. 

He can go weeks without incident. The wound can heal over for months before it cracks open unexpectedly when Rhett will do something Rhett-like. He’ll scrunch up his nose, let out the jovial thunder of his round, full laughter, holding his own ribcage while he laughs with his entire body like the Ghost of Christmas Present. He’ll get as excited as a child about the smallest obscure detail of something, and fixate hopelessly on every aspect. He’ll cover his mouth with both hands bunched into fists in a moment of playful anxiety like he’s not a fearsome, golden-bearded giant from a fairy tale. He’ll pull Link back into the thrall of his wonderland of ideas and passion and the bottom will drop out of Link’s life all over again. 

And he’ll remember. The rush of the river. The sweetgum. The Carolina dusk. But he says nothing, not to Rhett, not to anyone. He won’t tumble this house of cards they’ve spent so long building. 

Sometimes the only way to manage pain is to aggravate it. Push down on the bruises until the ache goes numb, the skin blanches white under pressing fingertips. Pain, like memory, is human; it can be bullied. 

Late at night, when sleep has abandoned him, he bullies it. Tortures it, and by proxy, himself. Pushes the thoughts to the point of misery. What life may have been if the world hadn’t taught him so thoroughly to bury and hide feelings like his from view, or if he hadn’t just been such a coward. Afraid to gamble the most important thing in the world on the chance for more; what they could have had together. 

Not an empire, maybe. Just a life. Maybe they wouldn’t have needed more than that. 

Hell, they say, is the absence of hope. After enough time, he’d thought, the constant aggravation would lead to numbness. Would scare the pain away. Or at least wear down its sharp edges. 

No luck so far, but it's only been twenty years. It’s come to a point where he doesn’t know if _away_ is where he wants it to go. After all, that ache of denial is the sharpest, most visceral way he’ll ever be allowed to feel him.


End file.
